at her questioningly.
“Well, you weren’t waking up,” she explained, “and I shook you and talked to you but I didn’t call Madam because she’d get mad, especially if she found out you wrote my name, but you still didn’t wake up, so I took off my clothes and, well, pretended like I was your lover and you just found me. Only I found you. But you still didn’t wake up.” Her expression was one of self-satisfied guilt.
Josh didn’t want to know any more. He got up, pulling on his clothes. This was the second time he’d fallen asleep like that – without warning, without choice. It disturbed him; he felt out of control and it left him vulnerable. He stared cautiously at Meli, fearful of all the treacheries she might have inflicted upon him during his failing consciousness.
She looked hurt. “I’m sorry.”
“No, no, everything’s fine.” He squeezed his temples to press away his suspicions. “You were telling me something before, about a Griffin and a Vampire.”
She nodded. “They were waiting for their friend. They were mean.”
“Where did they go, Meli?”
“Madam told them to wait in room twenty-one, down the hall. She said she’d let them know. They made a mess in the front room, they made someone leave, and everyone got angry at them, so Madam made them wait upstairs.”
Josh checked his knives. The wind was blowing enough so that the light bulbs in the small room glowed orange.
“Show me where,” he said secretively. He knew nymphs loved to reveal secrets.
Her face flushed, her eyes ablaze with the fire of complicity. She took his hand and led him out the door.
They stood noiselessly in the hallway, listening for sounds of danger. The coal-red electric wires along the corridor grew brighter and dimmer as the wind rose and fell outside. They started quietly down toward room twenty-one.
There was a sudden jumble of noises downstairs. Voices, footsteps, doors. Meli looked at Josh. “I’ll go see,” she said, and ran down before he could stop her. He walked on alone, to room twenty-one.
He put his ear to the door. Silence. He bent down, put his eye to the keyhole. Dull, electric-red flicker. He took a knife in each hand. He began to turn the doorknob.
When he felt the latch click, he pushed the door open and lunged in. Tense silence in a darkening room. The lamp on the table dimmed from blood-red to complete extinction, and only two small candles by the bed continued to shed light. Josh turned slowly, searching every shadow. When his stare fell on the bed, a shadow moved.
Josh raised his knife. The shadow stood up and walked to the edge of the bed. It was the black Cat he’d seen downstairs earlier. The Cat shook her head slowly back and forth at Joshua, then raised her paw and pointed to the open window, where the wind billowed the curtains.
Josh looked uncomprehendingly at the small animal. It whined. He walked up, scratched between its ears. It lifted its head higher into the pressure of his fingers. There was a noise behind him and he swiveled, but it was only Meli at the door.
“Don’t mind her,” said Meli, indicating the Cat. “That’s only Isis. She’s kind of odd.”
“Sooooo?” purred Isis. It was half word, half meow.
“Nobody here,” said Josh to Meli. “What was downstairs?”
“Just a bunch of King Jarl’s soldiers, come to have some fun.” Jarl, the Bear-King, had soldiers posted all through the areas south of Monterey – a ‘peace-keeping force’ that had moved in following the Race War, and never left.
“Yarrrrrrl,” said Isis, licking her paw.
Josh said to Meli, “Are you sure they were in this room?”
Meli nodded vigorously. Isis jumped down to the floor, padded across the room, and leapt up on the windowsill. “Soouuuuth,” she meowed. Outside, the wind began racing.
Josh stared across the darkness, first at the strange little Cat, then at Meli. “What did they look like?” he asked.
Meli thought a minute. “The Vampire was tall, even for a Vampire. He had long black hair and his eyes were scary. Griffins all look alike to me but this one had a broken beak.”
The last candle flared and guttered, and then the room was dark. The wind wrapped the house, howling.
Joshua’s pupils opened wide in the darkness. “I’m going to look around,” he said. Meli followed him into the corridor.
They looked into rooms through secret windows Meli knew of. They saw things Josh had never even heard of before – things that unsettled him. Passionate animals in compelling patterns of embrace, terrible scratchings, furtive moans. He wished he had time to write down everything he saw.
They tried hidden doors. Isolated candles lit their immediate surroundings. Forms and shapes moved out of corners and along walls in the darkened chambers as the wind outside steadily rose.
Joshua stared through the long dark hall, out the window into the rising wind. He thought: dark hall, rising wind. Dark. Wind. “Something’s wrong with the windmill.”
Meli looked at him blankly.
“The windmill,” he repeated. “It was making electricity when the wind was up, and now the wind is stronger but the lights are off.” He turned. “Something’s wrong in the windmill.”
His pulse snapped up with the realization, and its implications. He’d run his prey to ground.
“I’m going out,” he told her. “You stay here.” She looked at him quizzically. He hugged her briefly, and left.
Beauty stood motionless on the lee side of a slope that gave a good view of the whole panorama – house, barn, cottages, and garden. The smell of the creature was still in the air, but with the wind blowing so hard now, and shifting direction so much, the odor was impossible to localize. The ochre moon gave good light, though, and Beauty would see what there was to see.
The pain in his head had been numbed by the chilly wind. He had his bow out, an arrow loosely strung.
His beacon eyes searched the complex methodically. Main house, lantern-lit, occasional laughter bubbling over on a flight of wind. Stables, quiet. Cows and sheep, asleep. Windmill, quiet and still. Cabins, dark.
Windmill. Why was the windmill quiet and still when the wind was so angry and wild?
There was a movement by the back of the big house. Beauty watched carefully as the lone figure ran a few dozen paces, froze for a moment, then began running straight at Beauty. The Centaur raised his bow.
At a hundred paces he could see clearly it was Josh, so he lowered his weapon and waited. A few seconds later they stood facing each other. Josh was panting lightly. “The windmill,” he said. Beauty nodded.
They approached the old wooden tower from the east, walking in the shadow it cast by the low-hanging moon. Its top rocked slightly in the wind. One of the big propeller blades was broken off, but still, in all that current, the fan did not turn.
They
